Africa: Valentin-Yves Mudimbe - the Philosopher Who Reshaped How the World Thinks About Africa

Africa: Valentin-Yves Mudimbe - the Philosopher Who Reshaped How the World Thinks About Africa

Analysis - Congolese thinker, philosopher and linguist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe died on 21 April 2025 at the age of 83. He was in the US, where he had lived for many years.

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe: the philosopher who reshaped how the world thinks about Africa

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe. Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SACongolese thinker, philosopher and linguist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe died on 21 April 2025 at the age of 83. He was in the US, where he had lived for many years. A towering figure in African critical thought, Mudimbe’s work – translated and studied worldwide – has profoundly shaped postcolonial studies. He leaves a groundbreaking intellectual legacy on the colonisation of knowledge and the condition…

Valentin-Yves Mudimbe, 1941-2025: The Philosopher on the ‘Invention’ of Africa

Congolese thinker, philosopher and linguist Valentin-Yves Mudimbe died on April 21, 2025 at the age of 83. He was in the US, where he had lived for many years. A towering figure in African critical thought, Mudimbe’s work – translated and studied worldwide – has profoundly shaped postcolonial studies. He leaves a groundbreaking intellectual legacy on the colonisation of knowledge and the condition of Africans. This article by Christophe Premat …

Encounters with a Quiet Philosopher: Remembering V. Y. Mudimbe

(V. Y. Mudimbe passed away on April 22, 2025.) I took a course with V. Y. Mudimbe while I was a doctoral student at Duke University sometime in the early 2010s. It was a course on Existentialism. We read Descartes and Husserl, but much of the semester was spent on a page-by-page study of Sartre’s […]

The Congolese-American philosopher analyzed the 'invention' of Africa and critically examined the assumptions in the 'colonial library'.